For most Executive MBA students, a global experience means an extended stay with your cohort in another part of the world. While there can be value in the bonding that occurs on those global trips, the interactivity with local professionals is often limited to site visits and guest speakers.

But at Kellogg, all students are immersed into a global classroom in the first year of the program.

Every August, first-year Kellogg students have the chance to learn and work alongside peers from across the Kellogg Executive MBA Global Network during Global Network Week, an immersive six-day offering on the Evanston Campus.

True, it has the second largest population in the world. Also true, approximately half its 1.25 billon people are under 25 years old. But more importantly to my classmates and me, India is poised to become the world’s most dynamic big economy. As The Economistrecently declared, “now is India’s chance to fly.”

To see the growth firsthand, 17 of my classmates and I went to India for eight days of field research, the final portion of our TechVenture India course. This experiential learning course focuses on technology trends in emerging markets.

Aude Slama ’11 (KW13) just launched a new business – and she’s never been happier.

Based in Boca Raton, Fla., Slama is a recent graduate of the Kellogg-WHU program in Vallendar, Germany. This experience gave her the global expertise, confidence and momentum to launch her own business, Slama Global Search (SGS), a retained global executive search firm. SGS offers clients a tailored approach to executive staffing by combining a boutique organization feel with a truly global reach.

Slama shared her insights and advice on entrepreneurship, business growth and professional development. Continue Reading

Brazil is a country rich in culture, renewable resources and industry. As students in a new Kellogg executive MBA course are about to discover, Brazil is also rich in consumers.

Global Marketplace: Consumer Growth in Brazil is a new emerging markets course that uses Brazil as a case study for emerging markets worldwide. Taught by Kellogg EMBA program founder, former director and adjunct faculty member Ken Bardach, the course pairs the topic of consumer growth with its application in the Brazilian marketplace. [READ MORE]

The course partners Kellogg with Fundação Dom Cabral (FDC), a business school rated #1 in Latin America by AmericaEconomia three years running. With the course taught on both the Evanston and Miami campus and an immersion trip in Brazil, students will benefit from Kellogg’s global perspective and the local expertise of the FDC faculty.

Ken Bardach and Carla Arruda-Vasseur, program director at FDC, gave an insider’s look at the upcoming course. Continue Reading

This is part 3 in a series about the executive MBA global network course at Schulich School of Business in Toronto, Canada. Read all the stories here

Day three featured guest speaker Marshall (Mickey) Cohen, former president and CEO of Molson Companies, Ltd., who served in various appointments in the Canadian government. During the session, Cohen discussed his personal experience with M&A and concluded that “people matter” in every company. Finally, Cohen suggested that a decision that drives a company’s growth and legacy must be based on both human judgment and relevant data.

Later, Enterprise IT professor Michael Wade presented ‘Developing a Social Media Strategy,’ which taught students the importance of a social media strategy to capture knowledge, identify objectives, improve customer service, develop or improve products and to innovate. They also learned about key social media features, Google’s formula for top search picks and the dangers of bad media coverage.

This is part 2 in a series about the executive MBA global network course at Schulich School of Business in Toronto, Canada. Read all the stories here

Day 2 kicked off with Professor Theodore Peridis’s Mergers and Acquisitions introductory session. Peridis began the class by citing examples of reputable companies like Facebook and IBM that have recently merged or acquired. Peridis posed an intriguing question: If mergers and acquisitions have a 70-90% failure rate, why do companies take the risk? After the lecture, students also learned how to ask the right questions in a mergers and acquisitions workshop. Continue Reading